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invention by Alberti

…to be Alberti’s invention, the cipher wheel. Although he had been dismissed from the Papal Chancery in 1464 because of the retrenchment ordered by Pope Paul II, Alberti undertook this study, of obvious importance to the papacy, at the request of a friend who stayed on as a papal secretary.

use in enciphering

Other simple devices known as cipher disks were used by European governments for diplomatic communications by the late 1400s. These devices consisted of two rotating concentric circles, both bearing a sequence of 26 letters. One disk was used to select plaintext letters, while the other was used for the corresponding…